Unlike the previous theme for this website, with only a few options for changing the appearance, the new template has overwhelmed this novice with more selections than I know what to do with. That’s both the good and bad news. Good, because I can customize the site to my heart’s content, and bad in that the process has so far been full of surprises. To say it’s dominating my life at the moment would be an understatement.

I can blame it on Pat Evans, my sister-in-law, who commented yesterday on my last post titled “The New Look” and gave me some great suggestions about adding some color. You are looking at the results of an initial effort that will undoubtedly need tweaking. In the mean time, I’ve run into a roadblock in trying to adjust the color of the text within the sidebars.

The glitch is that the color selection applies only to “text,” which the theme apparently doesn’t consider the page and logbook titles within the sidebar to be. You can see the effect of that between the bullet squares (blue) and post counts (blue) for each logbook, the titles of which refuse to obey me when I think I’m telling them to hold their breath and change color, darn it.

Okay, so maybe the titles are considered links. Your pointer changes into the little hand symbol when “hovering” over them, and clicking takes you to that logbook. Lo and behold, the options page has selections for choosing the color of the link, another color with the pointer hovering over the link, and another color to show that you have visited it. That should be easy enough, right?

No, actually, it hasn’t been so far. Nothing I’ve tried has done that for any of the page or logbook titles, which must mean that they aren’t really links, or the right kind of link, whatever, which probably has to do with the fact that they take you to other locations within the site rather than to remote destinations.

But I should be able to test that out with “real” links that I’ve added to the site. Unfortunately, only three of the seven links do that. The others work fine, they just don’t accept the color changes I’ve made. I’m hoping that some kind soul might read this and offer the benefit of way more knowledge than I possess about this subject. In the meantime, I’ll continue slogging my way through the maze known as the Main Options page and hope for an epiphany at some point.

By the way, if you have an opinion on the newer look, I’d appreciate your input.